Faculty Spotlight: Hayward Nishioka
The following excerpt is from an article entitled “When Colleges Abandon Phys Ed, What Else Is Lost?” published on January 12th, 2015 by Scott Carlson for the Chronicle for Higher Education. To see the full article, click here.
It’s warm-up time at 7:45 a.m., with sunlight just starting to stream into a mat room in the kinesiology building at Los Angeles City College. A dozen students—most of them Latinas, all dressed in thick, white judo uniforms—stand at one end of the room, breathing hard, their hands over their heads or resting heavily on their hips. It’s too early to be up, their faces say, and way too early to bear crawl, somersault, or drag yourself across the room using only your arms.
“Ready,” comes a new command, “let’s shrimp!” It’s like a sit-up, combined with scooting butt-first along the mat. One young woman curses under her breath, while the rest bend to the floor in resignation. This is only the beginning: Later this morning, they will repeatedly toss one another to the ground, wrestle a partner into submission, or escape from a heavy pin.
Hayward Nishioka stands quietly on one side of the room, looking for signs of a transformation he has seen in scores of judo students at LACC. Most had almost no physical education leading up to college, he says, speculating that if they had known what his judo course entailed, they would have quit. Now, midway through the semester, he sees grit.
“By the time they get out of here, they’ll be different people,” says Mr. Nishioka, a professor emeritus of physical education at LACC. “Just this type of movement says to them: ‘I can move, I can roll. I can also go against somebody. These people are trying really hard to try to beat me up, but I am able to survive this.’ ”
Decades ago, Mr. Nishioka used judo in his own bid to survive. It was an escape route from a rough East LA neighborhood, to travel the world as an international judo champion. After his competitive career was over, he spent 40 years here at LACC—eight years as chair of the physical-education department—helping students with backgrounds much like his own discover the vitality of their bodies, the connection of that body to the mind, and the new confidence, character, and life lessons that might come from a little soreness and sweat.
“We are physical creatures, first and foremost,” he says. “Everything we do in education is about improving the brain. But how do we improve the brain? Through our physical acts. Our physical senses are our antennae.”
Mr. Nishioka’s focus on the body runs counter to prevailing trends, from kindergarten through college, where recess and physical education have been given up in favor of more sit-down classroom time. Although colleges have built lots of swanky recreation centers in recent years, studies indicate that college physical-education requirements are at an an all-time low. Meanwhile, researchers have seen alarming trends among the college-aged population: significant rates of obesity, hypertension, depression, anxiety.
Paradoxically, colleges are cutting back on physical education just as a growing body of research indicates that regular physical activity is key to cognitive development and helps people focus, process information faster, and remember things more easily. John J. Ratey, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has called exercise “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”
Bradley J. Cardinal, a professor of public health and human sciences at Oregon State University, has researched the decline of physical education at colleges. “There is definitely a point of irony with schools saying we want to focus on academics, so we are going to cut back on physical activity or physical education,” he says. “We do research showing the benefits of physical activity, and the federal government funds this stuff, and we don’t use it.”
Moreover, Mr. Nishioka, reaching back to the idealistic founders of judo, says physical educators are losing the opportunity to teach life lessons that go beyond fitness and health. The field or the judo mat, for example, can be a place to learn about loyalty, resolve, or courage in the face of sure defeat—a lesson rarely conveyed so effectively in a classroom. “Physical education should be more about teaching values, morals, losing with honor, friendship,” he says. “Even physical educators these days don’t think about these things.”
Mr. Nishioka: “Everything we do in education is about improving the brain. But how do we improve the brain? Through our physical acts.”
Mr. Nishioka made his fame though combat on the judo mat, and he seems to have spent his whole life fighting. He was born in 1942 to a single mother and never knew his father, whom he suspects was a criminal. He spent the first few years of his life in a Japanese internment camp before returning to East LA, where he was always in one scrap or another. Kids would hunt him down after school and call him a “Jap.”
“That was a war cry,” he says. They’d gang up on him. But the young Nishioka adhered to a Japanese principle of kataki-uchi, or blood revenge. He would follow kids home from school or go looking for them at their houses, when they’d be alone, and he’d give a licking right back.
When he was about 12, Dan Oka, the man who would become Mr. Nishioka’s stepfather, took the boy to watch a judo contest. “I was taken by their throws and flying through the air,” he says. “When we got back to the house, I said, ‘What’s that like? I want to try that.’ ” Mr. Oka put an old army jacket on the boy, grabbed him by the collar, and tossed him onto the wood floor several times. Despite the bumps and bruises, Mr. Nishioka was hooked.
Judo is a Japanese form of wrestling. Two fighters try to hurl each other to the mat. A perfect throw, landing a player flat on his back, will end the match. An imperfect throw might bring the fight to the ground, where the fighters try to pin their opponents or make them submit using strangleholds or potentially bone-breaking armlocks.
Compared with street fighting, Mr. Nishioka says, judo seemed easy. It had rules—and beauty in turning an opponent’s force into a sailing throw. But Mr. Nishioka went out on the mat with the same primal instinct for survival he’d carried to the streets. From 1965 to 1970, he won three national championships and a gold medal in the Pan-American Games. Judo took him around the world—on a goodwill tour of Europe with teammates like Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who would later become a U.S. senator, and to Japan, where he studied with Shigeru Egami, a legendary karate instructor.
As his competitive career waned in the 1970s, he began teaching judo at Los Angeles City College.
Mr. Nishioka observes all of this from the sidelines or while walking through the grappling bodies, stopping now and then to adjust a pin or a cranking arm. At the end of the class, he tells the students to encircle the mat, and he reminds them why they are here. “What is judo about? Is it just technique?” he prods. No. “Small judo” is just the throws and pins and how they work.
“But ‘large judo’ is taking the techniques and concepts and applying them to your everyday lives,” he says. To meet a challenge, to do the impossible, to have courage. “This is one of the few activities at City College that will teach you about bravery,” he says, gesturing to the mat, “because you have to be brave to get out here.”
